Pałac w Nieborowie

The site held a wooden manor from the late 12th century, then a Gothic-Renaissance house built in the early 1500s that stood until the Nieborowski family, bearers of the Prawda coat of arms, lost the estate at the end of the 17th century. Duke Michał Hieronim Radziwiłł, voivode of Vilnius and one of the richest magnates in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, bought Nieborów in 1774, and his wife Helena went on to lay out a separate romantic garden nearby that she called Arkadia, planted English-style with pavilions full of ancient Greek and Roman pieces. After Michał Hieronim's death in 1831 the estate declined, and his grandson Zygmunt sold much of its collection at auction in Paris. A nephew, Michał Piotr Radziwiłł, bought Nieborów back in 1879 and restored it, and Prince Janusz Radziwiłł, who took over in 1906, added a third floor to the palace in the 1920s and turned it into a well-known meeting place for interwar politicians. Janusz was imprisoned by both the Nazis and the Soviets during and after the Second World War, and the family kept the estate until February 1945, when it passed to the state and became the museum it remains today.